Progress! salixlive64-xfce-14.1 boots to the desktop. Hurrah!

Annnnd ... that's all. A big, bold cursor just sits there in the center of the screen. Neither mouse nor keyboard does anything.

I suppose I'm exposing my ignorance, but I have no clue how to diagnose this, nor any idea where to go from ...

Do I understand right that the 14.1 live kernel is 3.10.77?

This mainboard was made in 2009, so it seems unlikely that I'd need a newer kernel. I've tried several other distros on it, with kernels from 2.6.33 to 3.14.55. All of them booted successfully.

So far, Salix Live is the first modern ...

Salix Live XFCE i686 boots fine on 2 out of 3 machines I've tried.

It works on an Asus P4GE-VM with single core Pentium 4 at 2.4gHz and 2gb ram.

It works on an Asus M2N68-AM Plus with a 3-core AMD Phenom 8850 with 2gb ram.

But on my primary machine, an Asus M4A79T with quad core AMD Phenom II ...